What politicians say, and what they mean

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Honesty is a more important quality than originality in a political leader.

There is plagiarism, there is the selective use of quotations, there are cliches and there is the unintended borrowing of someone else's words and ideas. Speechwriters - or indeed writers of any kind - who are short on inspiration may be guilty of one or more of the above, although guilty might be too strong a word for a writer overfond of quoting from, say, Shakespeare or the speeches of Martin Luther King. One of the questions facing Opposition Leader Mark Latham this week is whether he (or his speechwriter) employed some kind of word-plundering in a speech Mr Latham gave last Tuesday. Prime Minister John Howard called on Mr Latham to explain some correspondences between a speech he made on April 20 and a speech given by former US president Bill Clinton in February 1997. Three separate lines from Mr Latham's speech were similar, but not identical, to Mr Clinton's State of the Union speech. The lines in question were uncontroversial sentiments - about access to the internet and further education - and probably would not have attracted much attention if Mr Howard had not asked whether the sentences had first come out of another man's mouth. Since then the Prime Minister has been accused of borrowing heavily from a book by former CIA analyst Kenneth Pollack when he made a speech to the National Press Club last year.

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How important is it that the words spoken by our politicians be theirs alone? Mostly we accept that their speeches are written by other people and may even be worked over by a committee. The speech-by-committee phenomenon presumably explains the preponderance of boring speeches in political life. A committee is less likely to be capable of the clarity, the creative leaps, the memorable images that good speechmaking requires. That is why politicians who care about language tend to be careful about their choice of speechwriter. It is probably no accident that Gough Whitlam and Paul Keating, both of whom are remembered for their wit, were close to their speechwriters, Graham Freudenberg and Don Watson.

But to return to Mr Howard's call that Mr Latham explain how it is that his words resembled Mr Clinton's words. Implicit in his demand is the idea that if Mr Latham committed plagiarism his standing would be diminished. And so it would, because even accidental plagiarism is a form of sloppiness best avoided by political leaders. But politicians have been known to borrow each other's ideas, just as they also contradict themselves or make statements that deliberately obscure meaning. If Mr Howard wants Mr Latham to take ownership of his words, it can only be because he believes words matter, as they do. There is nothing wrong when a politician is inspired by what he reads in a book, or a president's speech, but he should acknowledge it; after all, originality is not as important as straight talking.